A well crafted Exit Intent Popover can help site owners resolve this conundrum. Here are three reasons to explain how and why Exit Intent Popovers can be utilized to prevent shopping cart abandonment.

Don’t Be So Pushy. We’ve said before that it’s not practical to show too many Popovers during the course of a single visit. Rather than bombarding the user with a popover right away, it can be more effective to wait until the visitor has demonstrated interest by placing items in their cart.

Show Right Incentive At Right Time. They say that “timing is everything” and that’s certainly true in eCommerce. A meaningful incentive that is customized to what the user has in their cart, at the time when they wavering and threatening to leave the site is harder (and maybe even impossible) to dismiss compared to a generic popover that appears a few seconds after a user lands on the site.

Refocus The User’s Attention. It might be too late to change a visitor’s mind once they decide to leave your site. But interrupting the user’s path to the exit with a pleasant surprise might change their tune. (Hey, it’s worth a try, right?) An effective Popover eliminates decision paralysis with a simple task or question and can be used to remind the visitor how they will benefit from your product.

Think about it: the average visitor probably isn’t going to buy anything anyway. So why not focus on visitors who are on the verge of becoming paying customers? It is easier to convert someone who’s at least thought about making a purchase, rather than trying to warm up an ice-cold prospect. The conversion rate might be low, but it is still MUCH better than no conversion at all.

Furthermore, you gather valuable intelligence from everyone who seriously considered making a purchase. (An ideal “natural focus group”.) For example, if a coupon proves effective to overcome last minute resistance, why not take steps to promote a similar offer to all visitors? If the coupon doesn’t drive sales, then perhaps price is not the sticking point and something else (e.g., the trustworthiness of your site) is the root cause of the shopping cart abandonment.